Samsung has developed a completely transparent solar-powered monitor that's designed to be used with ambient light. Though they're marketing it as a television, it's almost certainly going to be used initially as displays in commercial areas, and it apparently is also a touch-screen, opening it up for the coolest kind of kiosk you've ever used. See a video after the jump.

People have this idea that things like contracts, receipts, pay records, job records, and the like need to be retained in hard copies. About all email has been able to replace in the workplace is the hard copy memo (if that). If we had a legal provision for storing digital copies of contracts, for example, or better yet a legal provision for signing them in e form, rather than dead tree form, we could do away with paper.

I think the rise of the tablet computer will go a long way towards this. I already carry all my important documents around on my iPad (sort of, they're on Dropbox, and I can fetch them on cue). If I start job hunting any time soon, instead of carting around a physical copy of my resume to every interview, I can just email it from my iPad for them. Oooorrrr just hand the iPad over for a moment... When more people have tablet PCs, I'd like to see a standardised document passing protocol, so with my iPad, I could point it at someone, and just flick the document to them (or press an on screen button, but gestures are where it's at, man!), and on their Samsung they could accept or reject it, and have it appear right there on their screen.

The company that I work for has gone a long way towards paperless. They have recently developed an application that lets sales reps create, sign, and approve contracts paperless and wireless. For the contracts they use a tablet pc and a stylus so that it feels very like they are signing a hard form copy and it also makes it feel more official for the customers as they can read it as if it is in hard form due to the tablet. The signatures gathered are real signatures (the same as if you use your credit card at the store) and not some form of e-signature that is replicated. Overall the process of transitioning has gone quite well thus far.

I feel that paper is still more "official" in most people's minds, however in a few years as more and more companies go paperless the notion will start to cease.

I think that paper is needed for several reasons :
-You can draw freely on it, not just write on a guided path
-It's light
-It's inexpensive
-It's easily transferable and disposable
-If you spill your cofee on a piece of paper, you only loose that piece of paper. Globally, paper is something which you don't have to care about, and can therefore more freely use. Frenzily scratching it with a bic crystal it is a valid option.
-It's the perfect medium for important letters, because using it shows that you care about the person.
-Considering the amount of security flaws which are discovered in mainstream OSs every year, do you really want to trust them to take care of your important documents ? I mean, seeing how quickly Elvis Presley was seen in an airport after biometric passports were introduced in the US should have some warning value...

Also, reading and writing is much easier on paper than on a computer screen.

- A friend just bought an Asus EP121 Win7 tablet. It's brilliant. You can easily draw with a stylus or take notes. I imagine that you can get a stylus for any of the current tablets. It's much easier to use than paper because you can erase, use different brushes and colors, layers, transparency and so on.
- Using Dropbox or a similar service you can make your documents easily transferable and furthermore accessible from anywhere. Wi-fi is widespread, mobile connectivity is reasonably cheap.
- Most people buy and carry a tablet or a laptop anyway, so there's no added cost or weight. Actually I'd say that it's easier to carry a tablet with thousands of books and documents than carrying said books and documents.
- Important letters can be electronically signed.
- You are less likely to lose your device than a piece of paper.
- You can search your local and on-line documents in seconds.
- Papers can be forged, copied or read without authorization, stolen, lost, crumbled, spilled upon, so I'm more worried about the security of keeping things on paper.

Do you believe information stored electronically can live longer than paper?
There are hundreds or thousand-years papers around
but CD-Rs are usually unreadable after single digit age. And even shorter can be life of internet posted data.
It helps then your data was duplicated by some persons, though. But there are a lot of broken links and information lost due disconnected server with single data source.